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The Reconstitution of Authority
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Third, I urge that the authority of Christian faith cannot possibly be
restored save as
the full interpretation o f Scripture is welcomed.
Here,
so it seems to me, is where most of the action is in present-day discussion
about the Bible. Broadly speaking, there are nowadays in the theological
world three main types of interpreters.
(i) There are those, Protestant and Catholic, who uphold the church’s
historic belief in biblical inspiration. These conservatives mean by interpre
tation applying to ourselves the doctrinal and moral instruction of the Bible,
read as a historically structured, self-authenticating and self-interpreting
organism of revealed truth. Patristic expositor-theologians like Chrysostom
and Augustine, and Protestant expositor-theologians like Calvin, Owen,
Matthew Henry, Charles Hodge, William Hendriksen, and the great, if
strange, Karl Barth, have gone this way. . . .
(ii) There are those, Protestant and Catholic, who view Scripture as wit
ness to God by godly men, who, though they thought wrongly of him at some
points, thought rightly and profoundly of him at others. The fallibility of the
witnesses, which some highlight and others play down, is universally allowed
for, and arguments are constantly being mounted from the coherence of this
or that assertion with the main stream of biblical thought to justify accepting
the assertion as true. The (curious?) basis of this reasoning is that the Bible
as a whole can’t be wrong, though individual contributors to it can. . . .
(iii) There are those, mainly, though not invariably, Protestant, for whom
the New Testament (the Old is a separate problem) is a culturally deter
mined verbalizing of ineffable existential encounters with God. These inter
preters make two assumptions. The first is that God does not communicate
with men through language. The second is that biblical thoughts about rela
tions with him are “mythological” constructs in the sense that they function
not as windows through which we watch God at work and so learn his ways,
hut as mirrors in which we see reflected the minds of the men whose encoun-
tcrs with God the myths objectify. What we learn from this is precisely their
“self-understanding”—which, indeed, we may then come to share as our liv
ing, though voiceless, Creator similarly encounters us. This is the well-
known theme of Bultmannian hermeneutics, on which busy scholars have
rung many changes in our time.
Now my contention here is that the full meaning of Scripture can only be
lound by adhering to [the first interpretation. The second and third inter
pretations] fail, either by relativizing or by outrightly denying things that
Scripture presents as revealed truth; thus they fall short of achieving a full
interpretation of God ’s message in the text. No t that they attain no truth at
ill.
'They embody grains of truth that exponents of [the first] method must
not
forget that Scripture is no less human for being inspired, for instance,
-iiic1 tha t its verbal form is
conditioned throughout by cultural backgrounds
very d ifferen t from ou r own bu t as a l te rn a t iv es . . . they fail in the way